PSOW, or Practical Scheme of Work, stands for the practicals, experiments or investigations we do in class. Every IB Physics student needs to carry out at least 40 hours of practical work (60 hours for Higher Level students) and several practicals will be assessed against five criteria (manipulative skills, personal skills, design, data collection and conclusion).

Your final grade (this is the internal part of the IB assessment in Physics) will be a mark out of 48 and makes up 24% of your final IB Physics grade. The remaining 76% will be made up from the three Physics exam papers in May of each year. Below you will find the list of practical investigations we usually do at ISS, as well as some other, more general and helpful documents to help you with your practical skills.


PSOW at ISS (Physics)


List of Practicals (Assessed Against Criteria D, DCP, CE)

  • 1A Bending Spaghetti (D)
  • 2A Hooke's Law (DCP, CE)
  • 3A Method of Mixtures (CE)
  • 3B Charles' Law HL (DCP, CE)
  • 4A Refraction of Light (DCP)
  • 4B SHM of a Pendulum (DCP, CE)
  • 4C SHM of a mass-spring system (DCP, CE)
  • 5A V/I Characteristics of Resistors (DCP)
  • 5B Power of an immersion heater (CE)
  • 8A Wind Power (DCP)
  • 9A Projectile Motion HL (DCP)
  • 10A Resolving Power of the Eye (DCP, CE)
  • 10B Frequency of standing waves in strings (D) - (Standing Waves.pdf)
  • E1 Power and Temperature of the Sun (CE) - (E1 Power of the Sun.pdf)
  • E2 Parallax Investigation (CE)
  • G1 Focal length of a Lens HL (DCP, CE) - (G1 Focal Length of a Lens.pdf)
  • G2 Young's two slit experiment HL (DCP)
  • Inquiry Extravaganza (D, DCP, CE) - (Inquiry Extravaganza.pdf)